CHAPTER XVI
TRAVELLING WITH A BILLY-GOAT
Would you believe it? Karsten got a live billy-goat as a present from Mother Goodfields, and I got a live wild forest-cat from Jens Kverum's mother. Of course I wanted something alive since Karsten had the goat, so I begged and teased Agnete Kverum until she finally said I might have the yellow-brown cat I wanted. Not that I would not rather have had the goat, you may be sure, though naturally I wouldn't let Karsten know that. He was puffed up enough over it, as it was.
Well, anyway, we took both the goat and the cat with us when we went home; but anything so difficult to travel with you can't possibly imagine. Now you shall hear the whole story from first to last; for if anybody else has a desire to take a real live goat or cat with them on the train or into the ladies' cabin of the steamboat, they had better know all the bother and row-de-dow it will make. I advise every one against doing it. All the people who are traveling with you get angry, although it is scarcely to be expected that a billy-goat or a wild cat will behave nicely in a ladies' cabin. At any rate, ours didn't. Listen now.
Mother Goodfields had any number of goats. They were all up at the saeter except two, and these roamed in the forest with the cows, because each of them had an injured leg. But one day one goat was missing and nobody in the world could find it.
Old Kari mourned for it constantly and talked of nothing else. Every day she pictured to herself a new horrible way it had met its death. Either it had got caught in a mountain crevice and starved to death, or a wolf had taken it, or Beata Oppistuen had butchered it without any right to. "That Beata! You could expect any kind of doings from her." Old Kari went to and fro in the forest seeking the goat till far into the night.
But one fine day there on the forest side of the farm fence stood the lost goat with a tiny little baby-goat at her side. And that kid was the prettiest and cunningest you ever set eyes on. It had a soft silky little beard, and it stood on its hind legs and hopped and skipped as if it would jump over into the field.
The cows came and sniffed at it; the other goat, that had stayed at home with them, examined it very particularly; and the little kid danced, zigzag and every which way; and so it was introduced to society, you might say.
How we children ran after that little billy-goat! But Karsten was the worst, for he went to the forest every single day to tend it and brought it home every single night.
"I rather think I shall have to give you that kid," said Mother Goodfields to Karsten one night as he came along carrying it.